Still-existing utopian pedagogy: Architecture, curriculum, and the revolutionary imaginary

Abstract

While the manifestation of a revival of a collective revolutionary imaginary is more pronounced in social movements, we see it evidenced in a renewed interested in utopian curriculum and pedagogy. This article advances this trend by following José Esteban Muñoz’s methodology, returning an early Paulo Freire formulation of utopian pedagogy as a dialectic of denouncing and announcing, and building on Darren Webb’s project of reasserting the centrality of direction in utopian imaginations. Contending that our inability to imagine a radically different world results from the dominant temporality in our conjuncture, we mine cartographic processes as both archaeological and architectural to disrupt the perceptual and ideological restraints that muzzle our ability to not only image and sense alternative possibilities but to organize for the power required for their actualization. We thread this through a concrete example of an architectural utopian curriculum that demonstrates how archaeology and architecture can be blocked together or held in dialectical tension, which entails emphasizing that utopian pedagogy emerges from and as part of concrete struggles. We look at the Warsaw Palace, a still-existing socialist utopian architectural project, that can serve as a cartographic node in combining the openings of utopian longings with the political direction needed for their realization.

Keywords:

• Utopianism
• temporality
• Socialist Architecture
• Revolutionary Imaginary
• marxism

Notes

1 This is evident in the emergence of the International People’s Assembly, the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, and other growing networks of social movements and parties.

2 Perhaps partial is more correct. Halpin cites Eagleton (2000) who, in The Idea of Culture, notes a distinction between, on one hand, “the purely subjective mood of ‘bad’ utopia, which consists simply in a sort of wistful yearning” without any material basis and, on the other, a “good utopia” that links the present to “a desirable future [that] must also be a feasible one” (p. 22). Yet not only is this part of an argument about how the idea of culture functions, but Eagleton proceeds to show Marx rejected the subjective mood of bad utopia and, further drawing on Lenin, argues their political form “is the infantile disorder known as ultra-leftism” (p. 22).

3 Note that this definition is a presupposition for labor under capitalism and Marx doesn’t make a qualitative judgement between humans and other animals overall by, for example, merely stating humans are better than bees.

4 Think of Andy Merrifield (2002) whose argumentation is generally diligent unless it comes to concrete socialism where, for example, he designates the Bolsheviks as “anti-urban” because they transformed “whole cities into giant factories,” as nothing more that “row upon row of steel cranes and girders” producing urbanites as “little more than productive fodder, mere automatons in a massively centralized industrial process” of Fordist or Taylorist production’ (p. 179). To be fair, Merrifield does include one citation, but it is to a science fiction novel written by anti-Bolshevik Yevgeny Zamyatin!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek R. Ford

Derek R. Ford is a teacher, educational theorist, and organizer. They teach at DePauw University, Korea University (Tokyo), and the People’s Forum. Ford’s scholarship appears in popular outlets like Black Agenda Report, International Magazine, and Monthly Review, as well as in journals like Cultural Politics and Rethinking Marxism. They’ve written eight books, including Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Unlearning, and the Sensations of Struggle. In addition to creating and hosting the podcast series, Reading Capital with Comrades, Ford serves as associate editor of Postdigital Science and Education and the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. Ford edits LiberationSchool.org, is co-coordinator of Free Shaka Shakur, and organizes with the Indianapolis Liberation Center, ANSWER Coalition, International Manifesto Group, and other revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations.

Maria Svensson

Maria Svensson is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of North Texas.